Streamlining infrastructure and reducing costs for a US biotech

Client

Our client, a privately funded biotech company, is at the forefront of accelerating biology and disease understanding through innovative and cost-effective solutions. Despite their pioneering work in biotech, they faced significant challenges with their AWS environment—it was cluttered and required optimization in terms of security, costs, and architecture. That’s when they turned to Smidige for help.

Challenge

Our client was grappling with a series of issues tied to their AWS environment. Their workloads heavily relied on expensive EC2 instances, posing both financial and operational burdens. Security was another concern, with outdated IAM users, overly permissive roles and policies, and individual EBS volumes. Beyond these technical problems, the high costs associated with such an inefficient setup became a pressing issue for them. They realized they needed expert help with resource optimization and a comprehensive architectural review.

Solution

Smidige, an expert in AWS managed services, took up the challenge and embarked on a detailed architectural review of the client’s AWS setup. This review resulted in a list of actionable items, broken down into high, medium, and low priorities, and a clear roadmap for resolving the identified issues.

The Smidige team leveraged services like ECS, Fargate, Lambda, API Gateway, S3, and CloudWatch to address these inefficiencies. Unused resources were removed, individual security groups were locked down, and a VPN was implemented for services intended for internal use only.

Beyond these security enhancements, a significant shift occurred as Smidige transitioned the client from an EC2-reliant setup to serverless services like Fargate and Lambda.

Achievements

The benefits the biotech company experienced as a result of Smidige’s work were significant. A cost reduction of over 40% was achieved, and they experienced improved security, enhanced service availability, and efficiency gains. An unexpected benefit emerged as well: the client’s staff were able to save time, focusing more on their core mission instead of managing their AWS environment.

Impact

Reflecting on the project, our client noted: “Smidige’s team of experts not only helped us streamline our AWS environment but also significantly cut our costs. Their comprehensive architectural review revealed areas of improvement that we had overlooked. Moving to serverless architecture has freed up our resources and allowed us to focus more on our core mission. Their dedication to continuous service optimization shows in our flourishing partnership. We look forward to our continued collaboration.”

With Smidige’s help, our client not only optimized their AWS environment but also built a strong partnership that continues to thrive. They can now focus on what they do best—advancing biology understanding and disease treatment—knowing their AWS environment is in expert hands.

Technology

The key technologies and methodologies that were fundamental to this transformation included AWS’s ECS, Fargate, Lambda, API Gateway, S3, and CloudWatch. Using a milestone-based approach, the Smidige team systematically worked through the priority list of issues to be addressed, bringing the client closer to an optimized, cost-effective, and secure AWS environment with each step. The AWS Well-Architected Framework served as a crucial guide, helping ensure the optimization and long-term sustainability of the solution.